Here’s how we can eliminate wooden pallets in the supply chain

Do you realize that we produce 500 million pallets a year in the US alone to replace the worn pallets that we discard each year?

The number of pallets out there is truly staggering. Nearly 2 billion wooden pallets are currently in circulation in the US, with a majority of them replaced each year. This consumes an estimated 50 percent of the country’s annual hardwood harvest.

This in turn represents a very significant market for the lumber industry ($6 billion in annual sales if you can believe it), especially when one considers that roughly half of these pallets are intended to be used only once and then discarded. And since the pallets tend to be full of difficult-to-remove nails, a percentage of these single-use pallets often end up in landfills.